Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Years passed. I went to the village most years to work with Nirmal and the children.

 

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I taught English, and there was one young girl I particularly remembered. Her name was Mridula, and she was the main carer for her mother, who was dying of cancer.

 

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Nirmal grew older, and gradually ceased to respond to my letters. My last visit to the village was in 1991, and Nirmal wasn't even there. By the mid-nineties, I had developed other interests, had helped found and build a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom which I still serve.

 

Then, in 2005, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from Nirmal. He was now 97 years of age, blind and infirm. In his letter he said that he was alone and there was no-one to help him. He begged me to come and see him.

 

I had no idea what to do. I feared that the village would have changed so much that I would find myself among strangers. I feared that Nirmal would need an intervention I could not provide.

 

In the end, after much soul searching, I realized that I had no choice but to go. I found Nirmal in a poor condition though not by any means bereft of support. I was able to improve his situation a little, and he was happy to see me.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I went in search of the handful of children I had been closest to. When Mitthu was a tiny girl, she was my protector. She used to bring me cups of tea, and act as my bodyguard. Whenever I crossed a road she would gravely take my large white hand in her tiny brown one to make sure I crossed safely. When I returned after many years absence it was to find her married, and heavily pregnant with her first child. She had no idea I was coming, and I no way of knowing she would still be there, girls often marrying outside and moving away.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

They were all indeed married, but still in the village.

 

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Mridula now had two girls of her own.

 

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Her father, Ashraf, had been a good friend. I now found that he was paralyzed from a stroke, though he broke into a delighted grin when he saw me. He died while I was there.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Over the next few years I visited the village at least once, sometimes twice a year.

 

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In time I adopted, and was adopted by, Mridula's extended family. I simply extended it further.

 

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Now that Nirmal was so frail, I wanted to help Paddyfield School all the more. But sadly, I gradually came to learn that those who ran it now did so for largely selfish reasons. My support did not go where it was intended. The passionate commitment of previous generations had been lost, though I found this emotionally very difficult to accept for a long time.

 

Nirmal had said to me many times that he felt establishing a center had been the worst mistake he'd ever made. 'I transformed a vibrant youth movement into a banana republic.' Where then, if no longer here, was that vibrancy and commitment to be found? I was still looking...

 

Visiting Mridula for the second time, I met her cousin Lucina.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

By all accounts a brilliant student, her family had fallen on hard times, and she was living on a single chapati a day. She said to me recently, 'I did not even realize that food had different taste until much later. I just put whatever I was given in my mouth and chewed.'

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Seeing that I could not work effectively any longer through Paddyfield School, I began to offer direct support to individuals where I felt I could make a difference. Unfortunately they did not always have a happy ending.

 

When Shabana was 11 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her father, Manan, once a relatively well off farmer, bankrupted himself long before I ever met him, buying ineffectual homeopathic medicines for her.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I arranged for a friend of mine from Calcutta, Dr. Subhasis Chakrabarti, to come see her. Subha was wonderful with her. We took her for x-rays, paid for a specialist to see her as well, but found that unfortunately the tumor had become inoperable. The tumor had stunted her growth, and by then she had become blind. She was 15 in this photo, but looked more like 7 or 8.

 

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Alas, she died soon after.

 

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Tuku, on the left in this photo, had been 8 years old when I first knew her, and full of mischief.

 

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Then as she grew, she formed the idea of learning traditional Indian dance, Barata Natyam. So she went to college.

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Over the past ten long years I've helped her buy land and build a house which will in time double as a dance studio.

 

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She will teach a Hindu dance form to Muslim children, in a Muslim village.

 

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And her daughter, Honey, will dance.

 

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Lucina's situation was more complex. She could not afford college fees, and her parents wanted to marry her off to a wealthy family in Singapore.